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Quote of note


Real men marry women.

—The fortune inside a fortune cookie handed out at the Republican National Convention by the Family Research Council

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Rockin’ the vote


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These days it’s almost impossible to avoid turning on the news or reading the paper without hearing stories about the politics of politics — that is, tales about the campaign trail, candidates’ families, scandals, and occasionally the candidates’ platforms.

Save for those moments when the candidates seek the support of voting blocs — the Jewish vote, the Latino vote, the female vote, the black vote — the predicaments of those on the margins of the United States and the world at-large receive scant attention. In this issue of InTheFray Magazine, we seek to broaden this year’s election dialogue by illuminating the interests and stories of the politically invisible.

Writing from the Democratic National Convention in Boston, ITF Contributing Writer Ayah-Victoria McKhail explores the media’s failure to cover the repression of free speech at the DNC in Tongue-tied. Harvard Ph.D. candidate Scott Winship, meanwhile, assesses the risks that the Democrats are taking by Compromising politics in order to send President George W. Bush back to Crawford, Texas. Complemeting Tak Toyoshima‘s Secret Asian Man cartoon about taking the Jap road,< b>Mikhaela B. Reid, our newest cartoonist, pokes fun at queers supporting President Bush in The boiling point. On Monday, August 16, ITF columnist and Managing Editor Henry Belanger will share his thoughts on the DNC.

Given the economic volatility that has predominated during the past four years, few can deny the decisive role that the economy will play on November 2. But as ITF Index Editor Laura Louison suggests in her review of David Shipler’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Working Poor (this month’s featured book from Off the Shelf), poverty isn’t merely an election year concern. For many, Louison discloses in Will work for food, impoverishment is a stark, everyday reality that demands national attention.

Of course, economic insecurity knows no borders — or age limits. As ITF Contributing Editor Michelle Chen reveals in Migrant makeover, teens from rural China who migrate to the city hoping to lift themselves from poverty by working in salons often pay a high price while supporting the country’s economic expansion. In nearby Vietnam, street youth participating in the Street Vision Project expose their economic struggles through their cameras in Street vision. Complementing these photos and highlighting the pervasiveness of the oppression experienced by children who lack economic standing, Josh Arseneau shares his poignant photos of child soldiers in West Africa, which we’ll publish on Monday, August 16.

Rounding out this week’s pieces are the visual works of art and the four poems performed by spoken word artists Joyce Lin (Understatement), Kate Hanzalik (Marilyn Chin tells my skin to run), Andre Michael Carrington (Boy rock), and Chavisa Woods (Totems) at InTheFray’s CROSSING BORDERS benefit in Manhattan last month. Special thanks to these fine poets and artists — and to all of our readers and friends who have continued to support our work here at ITF.

Laura Nathan
Editor
Austin, Texas

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Blog

No place like home


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From Judy Garland we learned “there’s no place like home.” If only we, like her fictional character in The Wizard of Oz, could just click our heels a few times and find ourselves at home.

But beyond the silver screen, navigating our way home is rarely that simple. Thanks to globalization, refugee flows, the dissolution of nation-states and the advent of new ones, and drastic cultural changes in the definition of family, it is increasingly difficult to locate and define home. As we partner up with the Asian American Writers’ Workshop for this issue of InTheFray Magazine, we examine the complex meaning of “home” — for both those who have left one country to resettle in another and those who feel like outsiders in their country of origin.

We begin with three narratives about the immigrant experience, illuminating the multitude of ways in which assimilation — and the lack thereof — shapes notions of home and identity. In her photo essay, Open Wounds (which will be published on Monday, July 19), Lajla Hadzic documents the destruction of Sarajevo, Bosnia, nearly 10 years after civil war and genocide displaced 2.2 million people. Despite international reconstruction efforts, Hadzic reveals that bombed buildings, deforested parks, and ramshackle housing projects are the rule rather than the exception, leaving millions of Bosnians homeless — both literally and figuratively. San Diego Union-Tribune reporter and first-generation American Elena Gaona, meanwhile, shares her struggle to carve out a sense of belonging in the United States while her cultural traditions reside primarily in Mexico in This is my country. Rounding out this series of personal narratives, InTheFray contributing editor and Indian émigré Radhika Sharma describes the role that her senses of sound and taste play in shaping her post-emigration identity and how they help her gauge the extent of her Americanization in I liked tea.

Just north of the U.S. border in Canada, the struggle to retain a sense of self continues. As I suggest in Strangers in a strange land, my review of David Bezmozgis’ Natasha and Other Stories (this month’s selection from Off the Shelf), Soviet Jews, once persecuted for their religion, struggle to fit into the Canadian Jewish community as their more privileged brethren question — even belittle — their brand of Judaism. As Ayah-Victoria McKhail elucidates in Seduced by the Stars and Stripes?, cultural identity is also political. The narrow reelection of Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin’s Liberal Party last month may have jeopardized cross-border cooperation on President Bush’s National Missile Defense program — and Canada’s close alliance with its neighbor.

Back home in the United States, three authors meditate on our politics of exclusion. Richard Martin eloquently explores the double bind  experienced by queer men in prison in his poem GAY LIT. ITF columnist Afi Scruggs in “I don’t care that it is not signed by a senator,” argues that introductory footage from Michael Moore’s acclaimed film Fahrenheit 911 illuminates the importance of electing black officials and of holding democracy accountable to its less privileged constituents. Finally, on Monday, July 19, InTheFray columnist and Managing Editor Henry P. Belanger will serve us a little of his home-style political wisdom as he questions whether the “revelations” in Robert Greenwald’s guerilla documentary Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism are really all that groundbreaking in Confessions of a Fox News junkie.

Happy reading – and don’t forget to pick up your copy of The Working Poor, Off the Shelf’s featured book for August!

Laura Nathan
InTheFray Editor
Austin, Texas
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Reviews

Strangers in a strange land

BEST OF OFF THE SHELF (SO FAR)
2004 Best of Off the Shelf

Just as Texans are told to remember the Alamo, Jews are told to remember the Holocaust. But as David Bezmozgis suggests in Natasha and Other Stories, maybe it’s time for Jews to remember that they’ve also wandered through the desert and trekked across international waters.


(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

To read Laura Nathan’s interview with David Bezmozgis about Natasha and Other Stories, please click here.

What does it mean to be a Jew? What defines a “good” Jew? Is one’s Judaism something that is performed through active participation in certain rituals and religious services? Or can Jewish identity be proven simply by referring to oneself as a Jew?

In a sense, the debate over Jewish identity is as old as the Torah. One could say debating Jewishness is part of being Jewish. But the increasing cosmopolitanism, refugee flows, and globalization that have characterized the last half-century have left Jewish communities around the globe grappling with these questions in a new context. As David Bezmozgis demonstrates in his debut short-story collection Natasha and Other Stories, the answers, when they are reached, are hardly final — or universal.

For the 320,000 Soviet Jews who fled the U.S.S.R between 1960 and 1989 to escape persecution, the debate over what constitutes Jewish identity is especially pronounced as refugees like Bezmozgis and his family cautiously — and somewhat naively — navigate the newfound ability to practice their religion freely. Only seven years old when his family left Riga, Latvia, for Toronto in 1980, Bezmozgis offers an intoxicating exploration of the poignant arguments about Jewishness among émigré communities, using his own experiences as a guide. Having just emigrated from Riga to Toronto at the age of seven, when the book begins, Mark Berman, the narrator in each of the seven stories, has stolen part of his author’s biography.

In Natasha, Mark tells the story of his family: himself, his mother Bella, and his father Roman, as the Bermans — like those making the transition from closeting their queerness to “coming out” — learn how to live the once persecuted identity publicly, openly, and as part of a community. In the Soviet Union, saying “I am a Jew” affirmed one’s Judaism. But in Toronto, the Bermans’ relationships to Judaism — and the Jewish community — are complicated by the tendency of some North American Jews to expect — even require — more than a moniker to substantiate Jewish identity. The family discovers that they must reconcile conflicting desires in order to remember the past, practice Judaism on their own terms, and assimilate into the North American Jewry.

Bezmozgis depicts North American Jews, meanwhile, as needing to balance the freedoms they’ve taken for granted with those previously denied to their brethren. What they’re all left with is a community that simultaneously demands definition and refuses certain definitions — and the people who embody them.

The metamorphosis

The death of a neighbor’s dog. The labor of establishing a clientele for an émigré’s new massage business. The visit of a Soviet weightlifter. A fight on Holocaust Remembrance Day. Sexual encounters with a cousin. The quest for knowledge about a great Jewish American boxer. A controversy at a Jewish old folk’s home when one man’s death leaves his male partner to fend for himself in a community of opportunists.

In the course of a full novel, these events might seem pedestrian. But without intervening chapters to denote the passage of time and make the process of change seem less acute, Bezmozgis’ seven stories demonstrate that identity is a work-in-progress. Or as L.A. Weekly columnist Brendan Bernhard puts it, “mysterious and seemingly random.” Although Mark participates in and narrates each story, one might not know that these stories bear connection to one another if not for the recurring Berman name. A mere first-grader when the book begins, Mark is in middle school by the fourth story — “An Animal to the Memory” — and is a sexually active 16-year-old just one story later in “Natasha.” Although Bezmozgis leaves us in the dark about Mark’s exact age at the book’s conclusion, he assures us that the narrator has matured considerably, exhibiting a thirst for knowledge and embracing the responsibilities of work, family, history, and Judaism.

Given Mark’s evolution over the course of Bezmozgis’ stories, one can’t help but read Natasha as a coming-of-age narrative — one at times reminiscent of J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita.

But Bezmozgis sets his coming-of-age narrative apart by complicating the common experiences of adolescence with the struggles of migration, loss, and Jewish identity. As we come to realize, Mark isn’t the only one to come of age in Natasha. In many ways, immigration is a form of rebirth, an event that puts adults back at square one and forces them to unlearn every cultural custom and norm that they internalized in their homeland over the years.

Children, however, tend to be more malleable, making the changes they undergo seem less drastic. Or perhaps their metamorphosis just seems inevitable, given the usual pitfalls of adolescence. This, of course, could lead one to expect that an émigré child would assimilate more easily than an adult. But as Natasha surmises, it isn’t that simple.

For Bezmozgis, an émigré’s life cannot be divided into two simple categories of pre- and post-Soviet life, religious persecution and religious freedom. Rather, the author shows destruction stalking each individual stage of change as each story ends with a form of death: The death of the neighbor’s dog. The disposing of an unwanted, non-kosher apple cake that denotes a bond between the Soviet Jews and the Canadian Jews. The death of dreams and the defeat of the “strongest man in the world.” The death of millions of Jews and the death of one individual’s understanding of what it means to be a Jew. The death of an identity associated with drugs, sex, and incestuous relationships. The death of a grandparent and the death of a stranger whose only relationship to Mark is a shared enthusiasm for a legendary Jewish boxer. The death of an ostensibly gay elderly man, the death of uncertainty over what it means to be a Jew. Occurring so frequently in Natasha, death and drastic change become predictable rites of passage.

With death ever-present as Mark comes of age, Judaism plays a more defining role in his identity, demonstrating that it is possible to keep vestiges of his past alive in his present. From his parents and their contemporaries — people who fear assimilation after living the majority of their lives in the Soviet Union — Mark learns that he can’t simply discard history. Or rather, he can’t discard the history his parents want for him, the religious freedom that became the cause for sacrificing everything in moving to a new land. Meanwhile, those who seek to erase the Bermans’ history and redefine Judaism for them reinforce the past the family fled. The feelings of inadequacy and invisibility that their critics inspire remind the Bermans that the past — their past — will always be with them.

Are you a good Jew or a bad Jew?

Coming to Canada with nothing but their history and their religion, as documented on their emigration papers, the Bermans initially milk their Jewish identity for all it’s worth. Judaism, after all, seems to be their only currency of any value, their only connection to others who don’t speak their language or understand their cultural idiosyncrasies.

As Mark explains: “This was 1983, and as Russian Jews, recent immigrants, and political refugees, we were still a cause. We had good PR. We could trade on our history … My mother … believed that [my father’s] strongest selling point [as a massage therapist] was his status as a Soviet refugee. The most important appeal, she said, was to guilt and empathy. That would get them in the door.”

Heeding this advice rather than appealing to the poor Soviet émigré community, Roman looks to Canadian Jews to help build his clientele. After all, Canadian Jews are privileged. They know people. And they know what it means to be Jewish.

Unfortunately, they don’t fully grasp what it means to be persecuted for being Jewish.

“The rabbi,” for instance, “was supposed to be particularly sympathetic to the plight of the Russian Jews,” Mark suggests. “To improve his chances [of getting the rabbi to help him establish a clientele], my father brought me along.”

Roman could of course prove his Jewishness simply by pointing to his emigration papers. But because Mark also attends Hebrew school and can speak very rudimentary Hebrew, Roman has living, breathing proof that the Bermans are not just Jews, but good Jews — Jews who make their religion a priority and consequently, are deserving of help.

But the rabbi doesn’t accept the “Jew card.” As Mark says upon leaving the synagogue: “Fifteen minutes after going in, we were back out on the street … and on our way home. For our trouble we had five dollars and the business card of a man who would print my father’s flyers at a cost.”

Given Mark’s tone, the Bermans seem to have naively believed that the sympathy of Canadian Jews would improve their lot and help them fit right in. But a combination of sympathy and guilt cannot lay the groundwork for an equal relationship between two peoples, particularly of such contrasting backgrounds.

In the story “Roman Berman, Massage Therapist,” this becomes increasingly evident through the Bermans’ interaction with the Kornblums, a Jewish couple that invites them to Shabbat dinner. One might assume that the Kornblums are simply making a kind gesture, but their intentions seem slightly selfish, more imbued with sympathy than empathy, as they try to play the part of model Jews.

This is evident when Rhonda Kornblum returns the entire apple cake that the Bermans bring to dinner. Explaining to the Bermans that “although they sometimes took the kids to McDonald’s, they [keep] kosher at home,” Rhonda makes Bella feel inadequate. The reader, meanwhile, can’t help but question this qualification. Why do the Kornblums make exceptions for McDonald’s and for their own kosher-raised children while refusing to make exceptions for Soviet Jews who never had the privilege of keeping kosher? Why don’t the Kornblums just keep the cake and throw it away rather than making their guests feel inferior?

The Kornblums, it seems, are a reminder that established Jews may manipulate newcomers’ pleas for pity to make themselves feel that they are “good Jews.” In other words, marketing one’s Jewishness may gain one access into the Jewish community; it may even earn a dinner invitation or a few minutes of the rabbi’s time. But it can never guarantee genuine, unmotivated inclusion. Perhaps at best, it can ensure a place on the margins, as the disparity between the Jewish émigré experience and the Canadian (read: privileged, un-persecuted) experience undermines the inclusiveness that the community prides itself on.

All for one and one for all: Memories of suffering

Telling the couples “what an honor it was to have them at his house,” Dr. Kornblum reveals that he and his wife have been trying to help Soviet Jews “for years” and “If it wasn’t too personal, he wanted to know how bad it really was.” After hearing their stories, Kornblum takes out a family photo album and makes a point of identifying each person killed by the Nazis.

We see this concerted effort to remember the Holocaust not just at the Kornblums’ but also when Mark fights with another student on Holocaust Remembrance Day in “An Animal to the Memory.” Ironically, Mark’s parents have sent him to a Jewish school to “learn what it means to be a Jew.” But when the rabbi — the son of a Holocaust survivor — tells Mark that even the Nazis wouldn’t do what he did, he implies that Mark hasn’t fulfilled his parents’ objective. Making Mark repeatedly yell, “I’m a Jew,” the rabbi replies nonchalantly, “Now maybe you understand what it is to be a Jew.”

But does he? Do we? Perhaps more than any other story in Natasha, this one concludes with more questions than answers. That is, we know there’s some connection between being a Jew and remembering the Holocaust. But the inability to pinpoint this connection is something with which Bezmozgis takes issue.

You can’t help but wonder why the Holocaust is treated as the end-all-be-all of Jewish identity throughout a book that is predominately about the Bermans, who never discuss their connection to the Holocaust. Pointedly, whenever Bezmozgis puts Soviet Jews in the same room with non-Soviet Jews, the Holocaust — rather than the countless Jews who died under Stalin or subsequent Soviet regimes — becomes the rallying point for Jewish identity. Those whose connection to persecuted Judaism derives from some other epoch tend to be treated as outsiders.

In fact, Natasha questions whether North American Jews are capable of articulating a shared history based on anything other than the Holocaust and its assault on their collective identity. The reader — at least this reader — can’t help but wonder: As North American Jews belabor this epoch more than the rest, do they disregard their own individuality and the potential of the Jewish community to forge a collective identity that is more true to the diverse experiences and memories of its members? And by focusing their energy on remembering a specific past, might they end up forgetting, overlooking, or trivializing something occurring in the near-present?

The problem, as we learn through the Bermans, is that the Holocaust isn’t the only thing Jews must remember in order to retain a sense of who they were and who they are becoming. Looking backward to a specific epoch — one that some members of a given community might not identify with — does not necessarily hold the answers for defining shared identity. For as Mark learns in “Minyan,” only empathy — genuinely and unselfishly connecting with and relating to other people for an extended period of time — can begin to ensure membership in the Jewish community. Easier said than done.

Death becomes them

Mark comes to realize this through the death of Itzik, a man who has been living in a Jewish old folk’s home. When Itzik’s death leaves Herschel — the man believed to have been his lover — alone in their apartment, hordes of people vie to move in and displace the bereft partner. Suddenly, Zalman (the man who runs the building and organizes weekly religious services) finds people he never met before, people who have never attended religious services, appealing to him for help. They go out of their way to convince him that they are “good Jews,” better than Herschel. In fact, whereas Zalman typically struggles to find ten Jewish men to form a minyan at religious services, more than 20 men attend services the Saturday following Itzik’s funeral. “Everyone [making] an effort at making an effort …” Mark recalls. “Voices battled for distinction.”

Here history is simultaneously relevant and irrelevant in defining Judaism. That is, the opportunists believe they’re Jews because their ancestors were. But they want Zalman to disregard who they personally have been in the past — Jews who have never bothered to attend religious services — and embrace them for who they promise to be in their moment of desperation.

One might expect Zalman, who was never a fan of Herschel, Itzik, or their queer bond, to accept the “good Jew” card, to privilege imagined history over active, selfless participation in the Jewish community. But Zalman’s explanation as to why he will allow Herschel to stay is telling about the myth of the “good Jew” and the futility of bartering Judaism:

Here the only question is Jew or not. And now I am asked by people who never stepped into a synagogue to do them a favor. They all have friends, relatives who need an apartment. Each and every one a good Jew. Promises left and right about how they will come to the synagogue. I’ve heard these promises before. And they say, “With so many good Jews who need apartments, why should Herschel be allowed to stay?” This is not my concern. My concern is ten Jewish men. If you want 10 Jewish saints, good luck … They should know I don’t put a Jew who comes to synagogue in the street. Homosexuals, murderers, liars, and thieves — I take them all. Without them we would never have a minyan.

Ironically, in casting himself as non-judgmental, Zalman, by equating gays with criminals and other immoral types, implies that some forms of morality — and sexual preferences — are inferior to others, even within the Jewish community.

At best, then, Bezmozgis leaves us with an open-ended final answer in the final pages of Natasha. That is, attempting to articulate a more coherent, more universal definition of Jewish identity — or any identity category, for that matter — only raises more questions. Sure, we can conclude that being a “good Jew” is less productive for the community than simply being a Jew on one’s own terms and showing up to ensure that the community lives on. But inevitably it’s impossible to call oneself a Jew and avoid being scrutinized by others who consider themselves more Jewish as they fall back on their own understanding of what it means to be a Jew.

Maybe the question we should be asking, then, isn’t what it means to be a Jew. Perhaps it’s time instead to ask why we as individuals and sub-communities define our shared identity in particular ways. For instance, why does being a Jew mean you have to remember the Holocaust above all other instances of anti-Semitism and all other manifestations of community and tradition? And how does the way that we identify ourselves in comparison to others impact the constitution of the Jewish community by creating divides within?

Maybe it’s time to acknowledge that, on some level, we’re all strangers living in a strange land — even if our passports suggest otherwise.

To read Laura Nathan’s interview with David Bezmozgis about Natasha, click here.

STORY INDEX

BOOKS >
Order through Powells.com, and a portion of the sale goes to InTheFray to defray publishing costs

Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=0316769177

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=0679723161

Natasha and Other Stories by David Bezmozgis
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=0374281416

Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=0679756450

HISTORY >

Operation Exodus
URL: http://www.jewishgates.com/file.asp?File_ID

World Jewry: Ethiopian Jewry and Soviet Jewry
URL: http://www.rac.org/issues/issuewj.html

REVIEWS >

“One man shock-and-awe” by Chris Nutall-Smith
URL: http://www.quillandquire.com/authors/profile.cfm?article_id=5795

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Interviews

Writing home

2004 Best of Off the Shelf

A conversation with David Bezmozgis concerning Natasha and Other Stories.


Recently, InTheFray Editor Laura Nathan interviewed David Bezmozgis about his debut collection of short stories, Natasha and Other Stories. Their conversation — and Bezmozgis’ thoughts on “home,” what it means to be a Jew, and writing — follows:

The interviewer: Laura Nathan, InTheFray Editor
The interviewee: David Bezmozgis, author, Natasha and Other Stories

Though the stories in Natasha are fictional, the similarities between the Bermans’ life and your own suggest that writing this must have been a very personal experience — one that you seem to be somewhat critical of. Tell me a little bit about what inspired you to write Natasha.

I wrote Natasha because I had wanted for a very long time to write about my community. As far as I knew there had been nothing written about the Soviet Jewish immigration in English – though there had been books in Russian and, I believe, Hebrew. As a reader of American Jewish fiction, I had seen previous generations of Jewish immigrants treated and, inspired by that, wished to do the same for my own community.

As for being “somewhat critical,” I am “somewhat critical” about everything. But the distinction, perhaps unintended on your part, between “somewhat critical” and “critical” is an important one. In the totality of the immigrant experience there are things to both criticize and admire. As with any experience — if observed honestly.

Natasha repeatedly comes back to the centrality of the Holocaust in defining what it means to be a Jew. Why do you think this is the case, and what are the dangers (if any) of this tendency? Also, as an emigrant, is this a phenomenon that you’ve found to be unique to North America?

The Holocaust is an undeniable part of Jewish identity. To think otherwise is naïve and to suggest that it could or should be otherwise is offensive. However, the Holocaust is hardly the only thing that defines Jewish experience. There is, obviously, much more. We are talking here of a people who have a history of several millenia and who have in many ways influenced Western thought and culture.

Now as for why the Holocaust and the Second World War feature in Natasha I think you need to understand the Russian (Latvian) Jewish experience. Latvian Jews (and Western Russian Jews) suffered, like most Eastern European Jews, from the Nazis. Those who did not evacuate or join the Red Army were exterminated. And those who evacuated lived in the eastern depths of Russia, sent their sons and husbands to the front, and — at the war’s conclusion — returned home to find that home no longer existed. This happened only 60 years ago. These people are still alive. The experience is central to who they are. How could is be otherwise? The experience (if only of the Great Patriotic War) was made central to the education of their children. To this day, speaking to my grandfather or his friends, talk of the war is common. It has marked them permanently.

As for dangers of this tendency to invoke the war and the Holocaust — I think any gratuitous invocation is dangerous. But I think just as dangerous is any reactionary tendency to begrudge these people the right to speak about their past.

Twenty-four years after emigrating from the Soviet Union, do you find that you have fully assimilated into the North American Jewish community, or do you still feel like an outsider at times?

Your word “fully” presupposes a lot. As much as possible, the local Jewish communities invited the Russian Jews to assimilate. I think “full” assimilation is not possible. I don’t think most Russians wanted to assimilate “fully” because that would entail abandoning their Russian past — a past which incorporates culture, language, history. So, as far as I know, most Russian immigrants of my parents’ generation keep as their intimate friends other Russian immigrants. But they have, to various degrees embraced the North American lifestyle. They now eat more salads and use less butter.

As for my “embrace” of Judaism and Jewishness, I have no doubt that by living in North America my identity as a Jew is much stronger and more informed. But as for “full assimilation” I don’t think I have the temperament to assimilate fully into anything. I would argue that this is common to most writers and artists. Some amount of objectivity is probably genetically programmed.

Fighting, violence, and aggression play an important role in Natasha. Tell me a little bit about what inspired your interest in this sort of sadism and why it plays such an import role in your stories.

Sadism?

As a Russian-turn-Canadian who has now resettled in California, do you find that there are differences between Jewish communities in Canada and those in the United States? If so, what are those differences?

Well, I no longer live in California, though I did live there for five years. I now live in Toronto where I find no discernible difference between American and Canadian Jews. I am told that the Canadian version is slightly more conservative in religion and politics. This may be true. But on the whole, communities of middle class Jews are the same. And communities of lower class Jews are probably also the same. The distinction that interests me is one of class, not nationality.

The émigré experience — that sense of loss of home and the quest for a new identity — in Natasha is, of course, centered around the Jewish Soviet émigré experience, but many of Mark’s experiences seem to extend beyond the struggles with religious identity. How, if at all, might your stories be read by other (non-Soviet/non-Jewish) émigrés, by other people who are struggling to discover a sense of belonging in a place that, at times, feels nothing like home?

With only two exceptions — “An Animal to the Memory” and “Minyan” — I think all of the stories are secular. Meaning, in order to understand them you require no background in Judaism as a religion. I live a secular life. My concerns, almost exclusively, are secular concerns. I think the stories reflect this. Though set in the Russian community, the stories are mostly about basic struggles – get work, learn a language, find and survive love. I think these are things common to all immigrants and, really, most people. These are not stories of existential conflict; they deal instead with a pursuit of concrete things. Generally, I am not interested in existential conflict (although I just finished reading a book called Rituals by Cees Nooteboom which was exceptional.)

Throughout Natasha you allude to the question of what it means to a Jew. With all of your experience as an émigré and a writer, what do you think it means to be a Jew? How do you define Jewish identity? And do you think that definition can ever be generalized or applied to the Jewish community as a whole? Why or why not?

… Some of the stories certainly deal with is the question of what it means to be a Jew. As for what a Jew is, I always think of the answer Rabbi Hillel gave in response to a similar question. The question was posed by gentile and I believe he asked if Rabbi Hillel could teach him the whole Torah while standing on one foot. (Already a good story, and even Jewish in its comic irony.) Hillel said: That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary. Go learn.”

To my understanding, then, to be a Jew involves not hurting others and learning perpetually.

Throughout Natasha you allude to the way in which people barter Judaism, the way in which they say things like “I’m a Jew,” or “I’m a good Jew,” to get ahead or to get what they need. When you allude to this tendency, you seem to do so with both an emphasis on the necessity of doing so for the new immigrant and with a critical eye toward opportunists. Would you mind elaborating a little on how you think this sort of behavior implicates the formation of a community, Jewish or otherwise, and what it says about the question of what it means to be a Jew?

People barter all the time. Life is a series of power transactions. This is not limited to Jews. If people were patient with one another and understood one another it would be different. (See above for Rabbi Hillel.) But this will never happen. The only compensation for the pain is if one can look at all of this with some level of objectivity and accept that the misunderstandings are often what make life interesting. That these misunderstandings are indeed the conflict which writers term “conflict.”

What are you working on now? Do you think that you’ll continue to write about the émigré experience, or do you see yourself moving onto other matters?

I am working on a novel. Though I am reticent to say to much, the subject matter is related to Natasha. I think I will continue to write about my particular émigré experience. Or, at least, this particular community. I will probably write about other things as well — though perhaps more in film than prose.

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Living by the hour


It’s no secret that the Bush administration hasn’t been a friend to the economy — at least not to the people who occupy the lower rungs of the economy.

In light of Bush’s reign of poverty, John Kerry has proposed increasing the minimum wage — which has remained at $5.15/hour since 1997 — to $7/hour by 2007.

Many people working in low-wage jobs often can’t get 40 hours/week. But for those who do manage to get 40 hours/week for all 52 weeks of the year, this increase translates into a meager annual income of $13,680 before taxes. In many instances, that salary is not accompanied by health insurance. And just imagine if you were a single parent with children to support …

Pay close attention to Kerry’s suggestion that increasing the minimum wage to $7/hour “would provide a family with enough money to buy ten months of groceries or pay for eight months of rent.”

His statement is a good indicator of the need to put living wage laws at the top of the national agenda. As Kerry’s statement implies, working full-time for $7/hour doesn’t guarantee a year of groceries or rent. The fact is that about 60 percent of workers in the United States earn less than $14/hour — before taxes. Most of these people only get by if they team up with another breadwinner. So even with this seemingly drastic minimum wage increase, single mothers and others without a second wage earner would still be forced to choose between food and shelter and working multiple jobs. Either way, they and their families will be forced to endure emotional and physical stress that is unsustainable over the long-term.

In her critically acclaimed book, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, Barbara Ehrenreich terms this unenviable predicament “acute distress.” What might be minor inconveniences for some can put such low-wage workers out of some much-needed money — or even cost them their jobs. The result, sadly, is that many hardworking people have no choice but to eat one meager meal a day, toil in spite of illness, avoid going to the doctor when they have acute problems, work two or three jobs just to make ends meet — even sleep in their cars or on the street.

Unfortunately, increasing the minimum wage still won’t drastically alter the predicament faced by these people. While the proposed $1.85 increase is an important first step, it’s not enough. Not only is it important for low-wage workers to vote this year to ensure that they elect the man supporting the wage increase, but it’s also important for those who don’t have to sleep in their cars to push for a wage that allows for a sustainable lifestyle.

We’re not talking Armani suits here — just enough food for a year and enough to pay the rent and get health care as needed.  

If we don’t push for more livable wages, two things are nearly certain: we’ll be paying exorbitant amounts as a nation (and as individual taxpayers) for welfare and Medicaid, and the poverty rate will continue to climb as the cost of living rises across the country.

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The newest way to ‘click and save’


On any given day, I receive at least one or two emails from the Democratic Party, John Kerry, Bill Clinton, James Carville, or some other democratic bigwhig. I’m not quite sure why I receive these, though I know I didn’t start receiving them more than a few months ago when the push for the 2004 election began. Much of the time, these emails concern fundraising for the Kerry campaign. Today the email I received concerned fundraising to stop the genocide occuring in the Sudan.

Is it wrong that I find that a bit peculiar? Do I want the genocide to continue? No. Do I think that we’re not doing enough to speak out about it and to intervene and end the violence? Yes. But is asking for money the answer? I’m not too sure about that. Sure, any peacekeeping operations that the United Nations send to the Sudan will require considerable funds, so money will be necessary. But have we accepted the “just click here to donate” trend reigning in our inboxes at the cost of actually acting? Is there a risk that donating money — whether it’s to stop the genocide in Iraq or to fund the Kerry campaign — is just another form of whitewashing, a means to a redeem ourselves, to suggest we’ve done our job and helped others?

It seems that while funding is necessary for most campaigns in today’s world, we have to figure out a way to help those suffering with something more than the swipe of a pen or the click of a computer key. After all, all of the money in the world won’t secure the political will necessary to stop the violence. With the suffering in the Sudan increasing by the day, we don’t have long to figure this one out.

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Bodies that matter


The costs of college tuition are rising, but apparently, so are the costs of high school graduation gifts. The latest graduation gift fad? Breast implants.

Yes, you read that correctly. The number of young women getting breast implants has increased by 300 percent — and a large chunk of those are requesting them for graduation gifts. After all, what better time to get new breasts than before you head off to college, where no one knows you — or your “real” breast size?

Never mind the health risks. We’re talking about people who are young and impressionable, people who think that size is all that matters. It’s no secret that we live in a culture where image reigns. Changing that might be next to impossible. So the real question we should be asking is why are parents footing the (very expensive) bill to give their daughters breast implants? Perhaps the centrality of image in our culture doesn’t become less important as we become older (and presumably wiser). Perhaps the idea that larger is better is so engrained in female minds that it’s being handed down from one generation to the next.

But in the process, it seems mothers who buy their daughters breast implants are also handing down something else: A belief that they’re not good enough, that they should get what they want rather than learning to embrace their bodies for what they are. In other words, they pass down a culture that doesn’t demand change, instead allowing them to accept and assimilate into a culture that isn’t necessarily female-friendly and that doesn’t breed self-confidence.

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Invitation to a beheading


Invitation to a Beheading: It’s not just a book by Vladimir Nabokov anymore. It’s the latest craze on CNN and every other mass-media outlet.

It seems to be the newest form of so-called terrorism — one that physically pains me to hear about and think about. Not only does it make me wonder why or how anyone could resort to such an act of violence, but it invites all sorts of interesting metaphors. For instance, I’ve long heard about the three-headed hyrdra. If you cut off one of it’s heads, it just grows back. The analogy has often been used to describe the futility of attempts to resist the State. The beheadings that have become the newest fad overseas are no different. There will undoubtedly continue to be repercussions, acts of violence committed by the United States and its allies against the perpetrators, or those closely associated with them.

So what do the beheadings accomplish? They’re a means of flexing muscles, reminding us that those who feel the United States and its allies have wronged them are here and won’t disappear. They are essentially attention-grabbing techniques, but beyond that, what’s the purpose? What else are they trying to tell us? And does their invitation really alter the political landscape of the world through our eyes or theirs?

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French fries — they’re what’s for dinner


Many of us go to a lot of effort to make sure we get the recommended five fresh fruits and vegetables a day in our diets. Now that french fries have been classified as a fresh vegetable, it should be even easier to do this.

Yes, you read that correctly. A Texas judge ruled last week that those freshly battered grease sticks, typically full of sodium and cholesterol, qualify as fresh vegetables. Kind of like carrots.

As Andrew Buncombe reports in The Independent:

Judge Schell, from the town of Beaumont, made the ruling during a hearing concerning the Perishable Agricultural Commodities Act. The department’s proposal to list batter-coated fries as fresh was being challenged by a Dallas-area food distributor, Fleming Companies. The company is facing bankruptcy and the law requires creditors who sold fresh fruits and vegetables to be paid in full, while other creditors can receive partial payment.

“It’s unfathomable to me that, when Congress passed this law in 1930 and used the term ‘fresh vegetable,’ they ever could have conceived that large food-processing companies could have convinced USDA that a frozen battered french fry fell into that definition,” said Tim Elliott, Mr Fleming’s lawyer.

But the department said that the battered french fry classification applies only to rules of commerce, not nutrition. It did not consider an order of fries the same as an apple when it came to the school lunch test.

John Webster, a spokesman for the USDA’s Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion, said: “The vegetables we are talking about encouraging the consumption of are dark green vegetables like broccoli and orange and yellow vegetables like squash.”

Webster can talk about encouraging the consumption of broccoli and squash all he wants. But given the dearth of money spent promoting healthy diets and the fact that the USDA isn’t saying ‘Yes, we called french fries fresh vegetables in this one instance, but they’re not healthy for you,’ does he seriously think the USDA has helped the obesity epidemic by classifying french fries as a fresh vegetable? After all, french fries are one of those things that restaurants really give more than one serving of. So now, not only can you get multiple servings of fresh vegetables under the guise of one, but you can increase your cholesterol and maybe even your weight while you’re at it …

And by the way, when did “fresh” become synonymous with “fried?” I’ve heard the phrase “fresh baked” (generally in reference to bread or cookies), but “fresh fried?!” Maybe it’s time for me to get an updated version of Webster’s Dictionary — or time for the courts to focus on the civil liberties that are beng stripped away in the name of the war on terrorism …

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I left my heart on CNN


Watching CNN interview the sister and son of Paul Johnson, the American being held hostage in Saudi Arabia, I couldn’t help but feel as if I was watching a somewhat trashy talk show.

Sure, there were no fistfights or arguments over whose boyfriend he really was. But there was something about the way that CNN orchestrated the interview that unnerved me. The “exclusive interview” aired, first of all, just after President Bush gave a speech to U.S. troops in the United States, Afghanistan, and Iraq about the virility of the United States military, about the freedom they are delivering to the rest of the world. Sure, Bush warned that he knows there will be more car bombings, more small-scale acts of violence waged by opponents of democracy and the United States. But God will bless America.

Take a commercial break and cut into a story about those opponents of democracy. And while you’re at it, throw in a crying child to move Americans, to tug at their hearts and remind ‘em that we don’t deserve this.

I’m really not trying to be callous here. Watching Johnson’s sister and son — and then grandson — was heart-wrenching, though I was moved not merely by their pain, but also by the pain of watching the interaction between the family and CNN. For all practical purposes, for the media, for the American people, this interview wasn’t about the Johnsons. Rather, it was an attempt to say, “Hey, see we’re not callous, freedom-hating folks like the terrorists. We’re freedom-promotin’ folks who just want our freedom back.”

The fact that CNN promoted the story by calling it an “exclusive interview” was, of course, a muscle-flexing exercise. That is, by default, CNN was the expert source on the hostage crisis, that the Johnsons had only agreed to speak with CNN, that the interview couldn’t easily be re-circulated by just anyone the way Al Queada circulated the images of Johnson being held hostage.

Then upon seeing Johnson’s sister and son sitting across from the CNN anchorwoman, you can’t help but notice the apparent class discrepancy. While the former are dressed very casually, the latter is dressed to the nines, never showing any sort of emotion, aside from the somber tone of voice, which seems to have been adopted for the purpose of making us feel like she cares. But let’s just say she won’t be winning an Oscar anytime in the near future.

To compensate for this, the few questions she asks are touchy emotional questions about their family — and by extension, the American family, we the people. She asks about Johnson’s dying mother. How much does she know? Does she know there’s a deadline on her son’s life?

She asks about the grandson, whom Johnson has never met and is supposed to meet this Christmas. The son, not surprisingly, starts to cry. I’m pretty sure I would, too (but then again, I don’t think I’d ever go on CNN if I was in his shoes; but that’s easier to say as an outsider). Though we don’t yet know it, the three-year-old grandson has been at the studio with his mother all along. About the time that he starts to cry, the anchorwoman says, “Hey, your son is here, why don’t you bring him out so his grandfather can see him.” Whether his grandfather can actually see his crying grandson — or son, daughter-in-law, and sister, for that matter — is questionable at best since his fate, it seems, is up to the whims of the hostage-takers. But we see the family, we see their pain, and that’s what matters.

It’s a reminder that despite the stoicism of the CNN reporters, we still have feelings, that we’re not a nation of cold hearts despite the torture that wreaked havoc in the name of freedom at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and lord knows where else. It’s a reminder that makes us feel a little better, a little more human, and downright American. But the fact that this spectacle, this snapshot of America, is so carefully orchestrated by CNN makes me wonder why the drama, the choreography, the muscle-flexing is necessary in the first place. Are such spectacles a means of rediscovering our hearts, or is the repetition of the carefully choreographed spectacles what ultimately numbs our hearts, leaves us feeling helpless, callous, indifferent? Maybe it’s time that these dramas make us angry rather than sad, motivating us to act, to demand change, rather than falling into a state of depression, a state of grievance and sorrow about our world.

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The many faces of war


Thanks to the Bush administration’s censorship of images of coffins returning from Iraq and the media’s tendency to treat victims of Iraqi casualties as statistics — or names, at best — our relationship to the war in Iraq has generally been a story of mass destruction rather than a complicated mosaic of individual tales woven into one.

But war can — and perhaps should — be a very personal experience, not only for those who are fighting or whose family members are fighting, but also for those whose name, whose freedom, war is being fought in. (And yes, it would be a mistake to say that the war in Iraq was only being fought in the name of the Iraqi people when we’re continuously told that Operation Iraqi Freedom makes the world a “safer place for democracy.”)

How do we represent our personal relationships to and opinions of the war, then, when the media falls short and is incapable of providing a forum for personal reflection about the war? Sure, the personal essay piece occasionally makes it into a publication, or some expert gets interviewed on Larry King Live about the war because s/he is an expert. And songwriters, of course, weave their war sentiments into the lyrics of their songs.

But while these stories, these modes of representation, can be quite poignant, I find that these stories rarely stay on my mind for long, generally getting pushed out by the next story on the news. That might be changing, though. Nicholas D. Kristof of The New York Times just published a series of poems about the relationships of individuals to the war written by people across the country. Reading these prosaic stories, the wheels in my mind can’t help but spin. I can’t help but feel the same way that I feel when I read a work of fiction and want to keep reading, or in many instances, do nothing but think about what I’m reading (or what I’ve read). Why these stories and this particular mode of representation strike a chord with me moreso than other tales of war, I don’t know. I suspect it has something to do with the fact that the brevity of the pieces leaves details out. Thanks to silences, omissions, a dearth of details that news reports would never permit, these poems invite — even demand — further thought and imagination.

Here are but a few examples of poems submitted to Kristof:

Alexander Nemser of New Haven, Connecticut, wrote about the death of a pilot:

His mother sent him pictures of his truck,
A pickup, hubcaps polished every time
He stopped to fill the tank, as clear as mirrors;
The dog, who’d lost an eye last spring; his town,
Apollo, Pennsylvania, near the falls
On Roaring Run; the watch his uncle won
From playing cards; his empty chair at dinner,
Audacious as the space left by a tooth.
We traded rifles, scripted final letters
And promised their delivery home. At night,
We planned escapes to Istanbul to join
The dervishes. Eleven miles from Baghdad,
I stood, dumb as a cow, and watched two choppers
Collide like fists and spin across the sky.

David Keppel of Bloomington, Indiana, responded to the torture at Abu Ghraib:

Did I hold a dog
To your terrified nakedness
Or perch you on a box,
Your outstretched arms wired
To the current of fear? . . .
Tell me what I have done,
I beg you, as you begged me,
Tell me what I can do
To make you forget
That my people never remember.

James Yeck of Boulder, Colorado, focused on those left behind:

A tiny piece of metal hangs upon a frame,
That has “father” written below the name.
The tiny piece of metal hangs in glory there,
Never left to tarnish by neglecting care.
The tiny piece of metal brings fame to the home,
Glory for its man who crossed the ocean’s foam.
Politicians send praises into the peaceful air;
Others smile now who once would only stare.
People from all around come especially to see
The tiny piece of metal, a symbol of the free.
A country’s grateful token to the bravest of its land . . .
Proud of their famous town the village people say,
“Do you know what this means?” with pride most every day,
To the little boy whose father went to war.
“Yes,” softly he replies, “I have no daddy any more.”

After reading these poems, you, like me, may want to do nothing but reflect on the meaning of the poems. But if you don’t, it only goes to show how differently each of us is affected by stories and different representations of war. A war, after all, has thousands of faces, and no matter what anyone else says, war is about people first and foremost, regardless of whether it’s fought in the name of “resources,” “weapons of mass destruction,” or “securing the world for democracy.”

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